UNIT 1. THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LEXICON

EXERCISE 1. Subdivide all the following words of native origin into: a) Indo-European, b) Germanic, c) English proper.

Daughter, woman, room, land, cow, moon, sea, red, spring, three, I, lady, always, goose, bear, fox, lord, tree, nose, birch, grey, old, glad, daisy, heart, hand, night, to eat, to see, to make.

EXERCISE 2. In the following sentences find examples of Latin borrowings. Identify the period of borrowings.

1. She’s not the girl for that job. She’s far too much of a hothouse plant.

2. The king’s cheese goes half away in parings.

3. Listen to her. All that filthy language she uses. And she looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

4. They work me on a one-way street. I give them information – they don’t give me any.

5. They went together to music halls, thieves’ kitchens, night clubs in the West End.

6. Your cup is running over with happiness.

7. His prose is new wine in old bottles.

8. Roadblocks have been set up in an effort to capture several convicts who went over the wall.

9. To Romans of the old school this was a new way of thought.

10. He had, in fact, burned the candle at both ends.

EXERCISE 3. Study the map of Great Britain and write out the names of the cities and towns ending in: a) -caster (-chester), b) -wick, -thorpe, -by.

EXERCISE 4. In the sentences given below find examples of Scandinavian borrowings.

1. A good husband makes a good wife.

2. Ill-gotten wealth never thrives.

3. There cannot be one law for the rich and another for the poor.

4. I’m not going to be pushed around by any murderer who is trying to clear his own skirts at my expense.

5. He dropped upon me suddenly out of a clear sky and began asking questions which I had to answer.

6. But there is the other aspect of the matter to take into account.

7. Travelling is a window on the world.

8. She could not keep order. Her class was a turbulent crowd, and the weak point in the school’s work.

9. The weakest goes to the wall.

EXERCISE 5. Copy out the italicized borrowings from the sentences below. Write them out in three columns: a) fully assimilated words, b) partially assimilated words, c) unassimilated words. Explain the reason for your choice in each case.

1. ‘Mr Langdon, again my apologies. I am calling to inform you that your guest is now en route to your room. I thought I should alert you.’

2. Langdon stared at the picture, his horror now laced with fear. The image was gruesome and profoundly strange, bringing with it an unsettling sense of deja vu.

3. Two months ago, an Opus Dei group at a mid-western university had been caught drugging new recruits with mescaline in an effort to induce a euphoric state that neophytes would perceive as a religious experience.

4. Although the Grand Gallery housed the Louvre’s most famous Italian art, many visitors felt the wing’s most stunning offering was actually its famous parquet floor. Laid out in a dazzling geometric design of diagonal oak slats, the floor produced an ephemeral optical illusion – a multi-dimensional network that gave visitors the sense they were floating through the gallery on a surface that changed with every step.

5. ‘This is impossible,’ Langdon stammered. “I have an alibi. I went directly back to my hotel after my lecture. You can ask the hotel desk.’

6. The tarot indicator suit for feminine divinit y is pentacles, Langdon thought, realizing that if Sauniere had been stacking his granddaughter’s desk for fun,

pentacles was an apropos inside joke.

7. As Sophie recalled her first childhood visit to the Denon Wing, she realized that if her grandfather had a secret to tell her, few places on earth made a more apt rendezvous than Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

8. The Salle des Etats was one of this museum’s rare culs-de-sac – a dead end.

9. ‘There you are!’ Langdon’s hoarse whisper cut the air as the silhouette slid to a stop in front of her.

10. Moving to his bureau, she opened the drawers and one by one began pawing carefully through them.

11. The heavily forested park known as the Bois de Boulogne was called many things, but the Parisian cognoscenti knew it as ‘the Garden of Earthly Delights’.

12. Langdon had never seen any evidence of the pendant, nor could he imagin e how it could possibly reveal the Holy Grail, and yet Grail aficionados still discussed it ad nauseum on Internet bulletin boards and world-wide-web chat rooms.

13. The private garage was small and dim, with spaces for about a dozen cars.

14. The foyer of the Depository Bank of Zurich employed as imposing a decor as any Langdon had ever seen.

15. He walked them to the far wall where a wide conveyer belt entered the room in a graceful curve, vaguely resembling a baggage claim carousel.

16. Da Vinci had been a cryptology pioneer.

17. Many great minds in history had invented cryptologic solutions to the challenge of data protection: Julius Caesar devised a code-writing scheme called the Caesar Box; Mary, Queen of Scots created a substitution cipher and sent secret communiques from prison; and the brilliant Arab scientis t Abu Jusuf Ismail al-Kindi protected his secrets with an i ngeniously conceived polyalphabetic substitution cipher.

18. It was one of Paris’s most significant historical chateaux.

19. Teabing wagged his finger. ‘Ever the wily American. A game of quid pro quo. Very well. I am at your service.’

20. That has been explored ad nauseam by modern historians.

21. With no leadership, the group falls into chaos and divulges other information.

Meditation gurus often achieved similar states of thoughtlessness.

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